She walked past Our Lady of Fatima Parochial School and remembered Sister Amelia’s shocked response, the accusatory gaze of Father Santori the day he’d escorted her through the iron gate and on to the hard concrete walkway, grasped her shoulder, turned her brusquely, and sent her home with a cold final word,
She walked past the row house her longshoreman father had finally managed to buy and recalled the mist in her mother’s eyes when the old priest left her house later that same afternoon and she came up the stairs to her prodigal daughter’s room and told her flatly that she’d shamed the family,
She walked past the little park where she’d met Frankie DaRocca and told him everything in a burst of anguished confession, recalling the soft touch of his hand on hers,
In the space of a few blocks she passed all the remaining architecture of her youth, walking like the condemned young girl she’d been so many years before, the old landmarks of her neighborhood still wreathed in hostility and disappointment so that she picked up her pace as she moved through the last of them, rushing like someone running a gauntlet, her white orthopedic shoes padding ever more rapidly against the concrete sidewalk until she stopped before the house she sought, so much bigger than the rest, noticed the big blue Lincoln in its gated driveway, and so knew that he was home.
She had never been in Leonardo’s house, and as far as she knew neither of his parents had ever known about her. They’d behaved like the aristocrats Leonardo’s father had always claimed they came from, American only in that they rode in fancy cars rather than in fancy carriages. They’d had high hopes for their only son, and early on Leonardo had appeared perfectly suited to fulfill them, a tall, handsome boy with jet-black hair who’d been the pride of Our Lady of Fatima’s track team, a boy on the way to some big school, maybe even Notre Dame. How could she ever have expected him to throw all that away over some dumb Sicilian peasant girl pregnant with a little boy whose small dead body she could still see cradled in Frankie DaRocca’s slender teenage arms.
She made her way up the stairs, surprised that one of Leonardo’s thugs hadn’t suddenly appeared to block her way. She knew he’d gone in that direction, gotten in trouble with the law, gone to jail, then come out again to become some kind of small-time gangster, a downward and disreputable course that must have humiliated and enraged Leonardo’s parents. She’d heard that they’d disowned him after he was nabbed in a stolen car ring, but she’d heard only scant news since then. Clearly he’d inherited the family home, or perhaps bought it after his parents’ death. It was the sort of thing she could see him doing just to get even with them, buying back the house of his boyhood with the dirty money his parents would never have taken. He was like that, Leonardo, a guy in whom hurt quickly turned to anger. She’d seen that early on, and so had never told him about the little boy he’d fathered on a rainy night in a Queens parking lot, and who now lay still and dead in the DaRocca family plot.
The door opened and he stood in the shadowy light of the foyer, an old man in a floral shirt and baggy pants, the handsome face ravaged by time or worry, or just the corrosive things she knew he’d done. His hair was white and thick, but beneath its silver crown the young man she’d once known had entirely run to ground. Deep lines ran in jagged gullies down the sides of his face and spread out from his eyes, creased his forehead and gave his face the look of desert soil badly raked.
“You want something?” he barked.
“It’s CeeCee,” she told him. “CeeCee Maganara.”
She’d fixed herself up slightly, applied a little rouge and lipstick, worn the dress she’d bought for Della’s wedding and which, though tight, still showed her figure to good advantage. Now she realized that these considerations meant nothing, her little allurements added in vain. There was no glimmer of romantic appreciation left in Leonardo Labriola, and so she knew that what little power she thought she might have had over him had long ago dropped away.